Russ Solomon, Tower Records founder who created a mecca for music lovers, dies at 92

Russ Solomon, whose company Tower Records helped invent the music megastore but was felled by the rise of digital downloads and growing competition from discount chains, died March 4 at his home in Sacramento. He was 92.

He was watching the Academy Awards and had just asked his wife “if she would go pour him a whiskey” when he apparently suffered a heart attack, said his son Michael Solomon.

A high school dropout who made his first album sale at 16, dealing used jukebox records out of his father’s California drugstore, Mr. Solomon built a music empire that sprawled across more than a dozen countries and nearly 200 stores.

Founded in 1960, Tower Records boasted more than $1 billion in annual sales, employing a strategy of low prices and a dizzying selection that kept audiophiles busy for hours. Under the direction of Mr. Solomon, known to some music industry observers as “King Solomon,” its stores modeled themselves after supermarkets, piling items on the floor and keeping their doors open until midnight in the era before the Internet made any song available at any time.

“Taking your date to Tower Records has become an institution,” CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff told the New York Times in 1987, “and it’s cheap if you don’t buy too many records.”

Mr. Solomon added books to Tower’s offerings in the early 1960s, expanded to video in 1981 and in 1995 partnered with the Good Guys chain to launch Wow, a superstore for electronics and software as well as books, music and videos.

Tower Records went out of business in 2006. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Yet his stores remained a mecca for music lovers — the performer Elton John once boasted that he “spent more money in Tower than any human being” — even as vinyl was succeeded by cassette tapes and supplanted by CDs.

At more than twice the size of rival neighborhood music shops, Tower stores stocked albums that ranged far beyond Top 40 hits to include international acts in rock, pop, classical and jazz. Mr. Solomon, who served as Tower’s chief executive until Michael Solomon took over in 1998, empowered his employees to stock their stores with nearly anything they wished.

“New Orleans had a huge heritage music section; Nashville had a gigantic country section,” Colin Hanks, director of the Tower documentary “All Things Must Pass,” told NPR in 2015. “Tower was, in essence, a bunch of mom-and-pop record stores. . . . Each store represented its city or its neighborhood in the city. They all had their own style.”

Employees such as Dave Grohl, who went on to become the drummer for Nirvana and frontman for the Foo Fighters, venerated Mr. Solomon, who wore jeans to work and invited visiting executives to “donate” their neckties to a collage of cravats he kept outside his office.

But while Mr. Solomon’s ambition helped grow the business into a juggernaut — his competitor Barry Bergman once quipped that Mr. Solomon had “the guts of a riverboat gambler” — it also contributed to his undoing.

His company took on $110 million in debt to finance its global expansion, and by the turn of the millennium it faced competition from big-box stores such as Best Buy and digital file-sharing services including Napster.

“As for the whole concept of beaming something into one’s home, that may come along someday, that’s for sure,” Mr. Solomon said in a 1994 promotional video. “But it will come along over a long period of time, and we’ll be able to deal with it and change our focus and change the way we do business. As far as your CD collection — and our CD inventory, for that matter — it’s going to be around for a long, long time, believe me.”

Ten years later, Tower Records’ parent company, MTS Inc., filed for bankruptcy protection, after closing many of its stores and struggling to find a buyer. It seemed to recover before filing for bankruptcy a second time in 2006 and going out of business later that year.

Russell Malcolm Solomon was born in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 1925. His mother worked as a bookkeeper for his father, and the family moved around California until his father started a pharmacy in Sacramento, inside the city’s Tower movie theater. The building gave Mr. Solomon’s company its name.

He studied photography in art school before serving as a radar technician in the Army during World War II, and later worked as a “rack jobber,” stocking store shelves with vinyl records, until going broke in 1960.

With a $5,000 loan from his father, he responded by opening his first Tower Records location in Sacramento. Eight years later, he expanded to San Francisco, then the epicenter of American rock music, with a 6,000-square-foot store that was reportedly the nation’s largest. A Los Angeles outpost on the Sunset Strip followed in 1970, and a decade later, Tower had megastores in Manhattan and in London’s Piccadilly Circus shopping district.

His marriage to Doris Epstein ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of eight years, Patti Drosins, and two sons from his first marriage, Michael Solomon and David Solomon, all of Sacramento; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Solomon largely devoted himself to photography after Tower’s demise, exhibiting portraits of Sacramento artists whose work he had collected over the decades. But he also remained attached to music and for several years ran a Sacramento record store.

His taste in music, Michael Solomon said, was as wide-ranging as that of his employees at Tower. “His own contemporaries would think the Beatles were madness,” he said, “but he loved it.”

Harrison SmithHarrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. Since joining the obituaries section in 2015, he has profiled big-game hunters, fallen dictators and Olympic champions. He sometimes covers the living as well, and previously co-founded the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago. Follow